AI is on the rise. Georgia college students say their anxiety is too.
Soon after beginning their college experience at Georgia Tech this fall, computer science majors were greeted with a sobering presentation.
“By time you graduate, the jobs you were promised through a computer science degree will no longer be available,” Parv Mahajan recalled telling the freshmen, part of their introductory seminar class. “So you should start making plans around that now.”
A sophomore computer science major, Mahajan works with the school’s Artificial Intelligence Safety Initiative, which aims to reduce the risks AI presents. He’s concerned the evolving technology is already eliminating entry-level jobs his classmates once hoped to get after graduation.
“I think people that understand this problem are having a really bad time, because it kind of seems hopeless,” said Mahajan. “What do you do in a job market that’s not built for you?”
College students across Georgia say they are feeling anxious about what AI means for their career prospects. And a November study from Stanford University won’t help to alleviate their concerns. It found employment growth for young workers has been stagnant, and that there’s been “substantial employment declines for early-career workers in occupations most exposed to AI, such as software development and customer support.” According to Harvard University’s youth poll, 59% of young people nationally see AI as a threat to their job prospects.
Morgan Kennedy, a junior studying communications at Kennesaw State University, said even small businesses in her hometown of Dalton are using AI for designing logos and advertising. Just a few years ago, those would have been job targets for recent college grads. “Why would they pay someone coming out of college when they could just not pay anyone at all?” Kennedy said. “It’s really, really scary.”
Can colleges keep up?
Universities across Georgia are increasingly offering more AI classes in hopes of preparing students for a changing job market. Georgia Tech currently offers about 200 AI-themed courses. The University of Georgia launched an initiative to hire 70 new faculty members with expertise in AI and data science. Emory University has brought on more than 50 faculty member through its AI Humanity initiative. Savannah College of Art and Design now allows students to major or minor in applied AI.
“Colleges and universities have been developing and expanding their AI programs, and if we don’t do this, we’ll be falling behind,” said Yan Ding, an associate professor at Georgia Gwinnett College, which added an AI course this year and anticipates two more by next fall. “An AI component is essential for any information technology or computer science program to stay competitive.”
The power of AI is “unbelievable”, and will ultimately allow people to be more creative and more productive, Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera recently told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. But he added this caveat: “The change is not going to be fun. It’s going to be painful. It’s going to affect some people in negative ways.”
Megan Mittelstadt, assistant vice president for learning initiatives at UGA, said students who feel anxious about job disruptions ask how UGA will help prepare them for the workforce.
“I’ve become fond of describing UGA’s broader goal as aiming to cultivate AI-resilient students,” said Mittelstadt. “Students who are not only AI-literate but also not easily replaceable by generative AI.”
Employers want students with AI skills, and universities should act accordingly, said Phillip Snalune, co-founder of Codio, which works with schools to integrate AI learning into their curricula.
“There’s an imperative to recognize that this is part of the landscape. It’s not going to be rolled back,” said Snalune. “The prevalence and deployment and requirement to be skilled at using these tools is only going to grow.”
Much of students’ anxiety is rooted in whether they’ll leave school with skills that are, Snalune said, modern and employer friendly.
“The concern, I think, for higher education institutions is that the pace at which this is moving is clearly a lot faster than they are moving in modernizing their curriculum,” he said.
Concerns and optimism
For the next half decade, Alex Jenkins thinks his field, computer programming, will be OK. Beyond that, he’s not so sure. A senior at Georgia Tech, he expects that all fields will be impacted as the technology improves. “For the longest time it was just computer scientists and programmers worried about where the technology was going to go,” said Jenkins. Now he’s hearing more and more students express concern. “Musicians, videographers, photographers, everybody,” he said.
Eilidh Munro, a junior studying philosophy at Kennesaw State University, is anxious about what AI will mean for students in the humanities, a field she said is already highly competitive. “I think the question is are there going to be jobs in the future where people need to read and write,” she said. If there are, “everyone with those skills will be going after them,” she said. “I guess either way I’m screwed.”
Not everyone shares the pessimism. As an English professor at KSU, Jeanne Law has incorporated AI into her writing courses and leads KSU’s “Writing and AI Technologies” certificate program. She sees AI more as an opportunity than a threat and teaches students how they can apply AI in professional settings.
“I think that makes them better candidates in interviews. I think it makes them better colleagues at work,” she said. “We hope it’s going to give the students an edge, quite frankly.”
As a freshman industrial engineering major at Georgia Tech, Baylor Brown feels more optimistic than some of his classmates. “Knowing what AI can do and how it could help you in your job is such a valuable tool that any employer would want,” he said. “I think if I was going into software development or design, I’d be really worried about finding a job in the future.”
In the end, like other previous technologies, AI will lead to more jobs and more opportunity, predicts Georgia Tech professor David Joyner. His areas of research include AI in education.
“Technology historically has always created more jobs than it’s replaced,” said Joyner, who sometimes finds himself trying to reassure students. “Look at all the jobs technology has displaced in the past, and yet the fields that these technologies were in continued to grow, and new jobs continued to come out on top of them.”
Student anxieties, he thinks, come from “a fear of the unknown at a time when the unknowns are particularly strong in how unknown they are.”
The end of Mahajan’s presentation to Tech freshmen included a slide with just five words: “You are in unprecedented times.”
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